I’m drifting, half-conscious, when the screaming starts. It is high-pitched and shrill enough to shatter glass. I get moving just as I hear Maria’s feet pounding down the hall, her voice calling my name. “Hay-zal, Hay-zal!”
By the time I reach the locked door at the top of the stairs, I’m dizzy, seeing stars. My stomach is a hard little knot, and I am painfully hungry again.
“Maria? Hey! What’s going on?” I slap my hand against the door. “Maria?”
She’s out there, right outside. I can hear how breathless she is. She’s scrabbling at the padlock, and I wonder if she has somehow got hold of the keys, but then she whimpers, and when the scrabbling stops, the door is still firmly locked.
“There’s something upstairs, Hazel,” she whispers. “In the bath!”
I have an instant memory of Abigail, the skin of her legs raw and peeling, her eyes unfocused, not quite seeing me.She had no face! She had no FACE!
“What’s in the bath, Maria?”
I think it will be an animal. It will be her imagination or the dregs of a bad dream. It won’t be my other sister, not yet. It’s too soon. I need moretime.
“I don’t… I don’t know! I heard scratching in there. I thought maybe it was a trapped bird. We get them sometimes, whenthey fly in through the holes in the roof. When I looked inside, I thought the tub was full of nasty black water, but when I put my hand in it—it—” Her voice is climbing higher and higher. “It was all tangly hair!”
I turn cold all over. Behind me, I think I hear a low snicker, a mean little gurgling laugh. I press closer to the door. “Maria, I need you to calm down.”
“It was all over my hands!” she wails, and I think she has started to cry because her voice has become high and breathless. “It felt like cobwebs!”
“Listen to me, Maria. You need to get out of this house,now. Get as far away as you can.”
She sniffs deeply, loud enough for me to hear. “I can’t.”
“Why? Why not?”
Another sniff. I wish I could get out of here and comfort her. She sounds so small, so lost.
“My brother said there’s bad things in the woods.”
Of course he fucking did, I think, and feel a pulse of real anger, jet black. As I shift position, my eye falls on the wire coat hanger. After I’d used it to lock the door back up yesterday, I’d stuffed it between the floorboards nearest the door. I prize it out between my two pinched fingers as Maria draws in another unsteady breath. It’s not enough on its own, just a piece of twisted wire that can’t magic me out of here, but now I’m thinking about Abigail again, or more specifically, the house on Beeker Street. I never knew that house to be occupied. To me, it had always loomed dark and haunted, with its overgrown front garden and metal screens over the windows. The screens had been installed by the council because the neighborhood kids had liked to pelt the glass panes with rocks. The council had also put up signs—WARNING! NO ENTRY!andUNSAFE STRUCTUREKEEP OUT!—but they had left the old front door in place, chained and padlocked shut. A boy called Luke Drayton in the year above me at school had tried to use bolt cutters to break in and ended up taking off two of his fingers at the second knuckle. There had been dried blood on the pavement for weeks afterward.
“Stupid kid,” my father had said at the dinner table that evening. “He could’ve just used a screwdriver and taken that door off at the hinges.”
“Maria, can you hear me? I need you to take a deep breath and listen. When you look at the padlock on the door, do you see the metal clasp it’s attached to?”
“I see it.”
“Do you see the screws on it? The little round things?”
“With the crosses?”
“Yes! Yes, that’s right! You see crosses, like the letterX?”
“I guess so.” She sounds unsure, her voice turning watery again.
“Does your brother have a screwdriver in the house? Do you think you can find it?”
I know Maria isn’t going to be able to take the hinges off this door. It’s old, thick wood, probably been here since the farm was built. But a padlock hasp? That should be easy, and if I can get this door open, I’m gone. Doesn’t matter how big these woods are, anywhere is better than this.
I slide the wire into the keyhole, twisting it so that I can apply tension. How long do we have until Andrew comes back from the chemist? I start to sweat as I hear Maria running down the hallway to fetch the screwdriver, lights flashing across my vision. I wonder if I’m going to faint. I put my head against the door, close my eyes.
Maria’s voice seems to come from very far away as she says, “My brother won’t like this, Hazel. When he gets mad, somethinghappens to his eyes. They go like the night. I don’t want to make him mad. I don’t want to see his night-eyes.”
Your brother is the least of your worries, I think, picturing that bathtub boiling over with bloodied, matted hair. The scratching Maria had heard inside it, the way the strands had stuck to her skin. My other sister is already much stronger than I’d realized.
“Put the tip of the screwdriver into the slot on the screwhead. Can you do that for me, sweetie?”Sweetie.I sound like Cathy, who uses that word when she wants to get her own way.I swear I didn’t take the money, sweetie. Come on, sweetie, give me a chance to explain.That day at my wedding she’d stood there with the color flushing her cheeks and her eyes opened so wide I could see the whites all around them, and she’d looked me right in the eye and said,Please don’t do this, sweetie.